Are you flourishing? Not “just getting by” or “making it through,” but truly thriving? In the last two decades, the field of positive psychology has embraced the concept of flourishing, the pinnacle of well-being. Distinct from subjective happiness or physical health, flourishing is the aggregate of all life experiences when every aspect of your life is going well.
America’s independent bookstores may look like the tattered, provincial shops of a bygone era—holding onto their existence by the slimmest thread. And booksellers may appear genial and absent-minded, like characters out of Dickens. But in reality, they’re the marketing geniuses of our time.
I am standing on the sand at Scheveningen, The Hague’s most famous beach resort, in the act of niksen, the Dutch term for doing absolutely nothing. I try not to think about whether I am really doing nothing if I am standing on a beach. Maybe I should be sitting down? But then I would be sitting down.
A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk began his reign at Twitter with an elaborately staged pun. On Wednesday, October 26, 2022, he posted a tweet with a video that showed him carrying a sink through the lobby of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” he wrote.
For a preview of how AI will collide with creative industries, look to advertising. Amazon, Google, and Meta have all started encouraging advertisers to use AI tools to generate ad copy and imagery, promising high performance, lower costs, and super-specific targeting. Now, brands are paying to advertise with AI-generated virtual influencers — synthetic characters that can offer at least some promotional juice at a fraction of the cost.
You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day.
Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simply, morally good or bad, and why.
At this point, it doesn’t matter how Napoleon does. Critics might love it or critics might hate it. It might crater at the box office, or it might single-handedly resuscitate the theatrical viewing experience.
The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature.
I still love software as much today as I did when Paul Allen and I started Microsoft. But—even though it has improved a lot in the decades since then—in many ways, software is still pretty dumb.
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
YOU’RE probably well-aware by now that AI is taking over the internet (and real life) and that it is becoming more and more difficult to believe your own eyes.
“They were the new Charles and Diana, in some ways,” Gary Neville, the former Manchester United player, says in the first episode of “Beckham,” a new, four-part documentary on Netflix. They, of course, are David Beckham, Neville’s friend and onetime teammate, and Beckham’s then girlfriend, Victoria Adams, a.k.a. Posh Spice.
Many people have put forth theories about why, exactly, the internet is bad. The arguments go something like this: Social platforms encourage cruelty, snap reactions, and the spreading of disinformation, and they allow for all of this to take place without accountability, instantaneously and at scale.
I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process. Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology.
